


the unhidden heart

by BucketofWater



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, M/M, Platonic Relationships, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26863753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BucketofWater/pseuds/BucketofWater
Summary: most are born with a soulmate; a blessing bestowed by the Gods to their faithful. Caleb is yet to meet his intended, the name cut across his skin stark and true: Lucien.Mollymauk, equally alone, is just struggling to remember who exactly Bren is.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 17
Kudos: 145





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I just think that soulmate aus are neat. 
> 
> not beta'd because I'm secretly illiterate so apologies if there are any errors. also, yes, I did get very distracted reading up on flower language while writing this chapter. 
> 
> my tumblr is @ereborslionheart if you would like to chat <3

Mama and Papa did not keep any books. Their small home only had three shelves in the entirety of their two rooms; one shelf laden heavily with pots and skillets, cast irons and wooden bowls. The second shelf held a collection of spices and clumps of putrid smelling herbs that Mama would sometimes crush down into a paste to rub over his scabs if Caleb went out and scraped himself up while playing too rough.   
  
Caleb hated that shelf, it smelled of green rot and set his teeth on edge with the bitter memory of stinging knees.   
  
The very last shelf was in their bedroom, and it was also his favourite. At the end of each day Papa would have to reach up very high, always bellowing a loud groan that Mama would swat him for, and stack their shoes neatly. It was to keep the rats away, but Caleb never really understood the precaution; the leather was too old anyway, it wouldn’t be tasty, even if the rats somehow stewed it.   
  
But the lack of books did not mean that he had no stories; Mama was very good at telling him stories.  
  
Each night, after their shoes were put away and sometimes after supper, if father brought it home, they would bundle down into their big bed and Mama would tell him tales. The mattress was crushed straw, which prickled through the thin linen covering, and often Caleb dreamt of stables when laying on it, but it was warm tucked between his parents and he could never find a complaint.   
  
A single candle spluttered on the floor beside them, the wick creaking hollowly in the dim room. If Caleb closed his eyes he could imagine that the roar was a blazing inferno, about to gobble up the entire house! But when he opened his eyes again it was still just a tiny flame.   
  
To his right, Mama wrapped her very thin arm over his chest, pulling him into the warmth of her embrace. His tummy griped, empty and upset, but Caleb knew better than to complain. If Papa had brought anything to eat home, Caleb would surely have been the first to know.   
  
“Well, my little _Schatz_ ,” she said, her gentle voice swaddling him just as well as a blanket, “what would we like to hear about tonight?”  
  
Caleb looked up at her face, creased with wrinkles he did not remember and her mouth curved into a beautiful smile. He pouted his lip out very seriously, as if caught deep in thought - though the wry curve of her brow told him that they both knew what he wanted to hear.   
  
It was the same thing he had asked about for weeks now, his very favourite story of them all.  
  
“Tell me about Lucien!” He beamed, holding up his arm and twisting his wrist so that the blunt letters gleamed like wet ink in the dull light.  
  
“Yes, of course,” Mama smiled, swiping her thumb across the name softly, “what ever should they have gotten up to today, I wonder?”  
  
“Probably killed that dragon, for a start,” Caleb said, very seriously.   
  
Ever since the foreign name had appeared overnight on Caleb’s wrist, their stories had been filled with wild imaginings of what the faceless person was like. Mama had assumed they were a human, a noble perhaps, to have such a fancy name. Papa had interjected that he thought them to be an elf, and that perhaps they were a scholar of some sort, so that they could tell Caleb stories from all over the world.   
  
Caleb decided that they were an adventurer, however, and last night Mama told him that they found a dragon! Her stories were a wonder to him, her soft voice breathing energy and life into the events as she spoke. Sometimes, if there was a rather rude man, Mama would puff up her chest and pout her mouth and speak in a voice deeper than Papa’s until Caleb was hysterical with laughter.   
  
“Alright then, my boy,” Mama said, tucking him up against her bony side, “they killed the dragon.”

\---

Mollymauk can still recall the day he felt the weight of his first breath.  
  
It was easy to remember the way air swelled beneath his heart. His chest shuddering and creaking like a mechanism yawning to life. He must be one of very few, he thinks, to recall that pungent inhalation, forceful and painful, the unnatural heaving of a body that was simultaneously foreign and decidedly his own. Most people did not begin fully grown, and most people were born of parents rather than the earth; not all, but enough so that he knew even then, blind and disoriented, that he was a curiosity.  
  
He had opened his eyes to a blackness, inhaled with a shuddering jilt and choked on the pressing, solid nothingness around him. Spurred by desperation, his throat constricted like a vice, it had been easy to claw his way out of that encompassing vice-like dark. The loosely packed dirt was sun-warm and clung fiercely to his skin, smudged black under his fingernails and plastered to his palms.   
  
Only three handfuls of the heated darkness, four and then five, before a blinding gap emerged, piercing into his skull with a battering blue light.  
  
Light. He knew what light was. He didn’t know how he knew but he did.   
  
He pushed himself upwards, teetering over the cusp and into that terribly brilliant thing, light settling warm against his skin.  
  
Somewhere, in the back of a mind he did not remember, a voice joked about not heading for the light.   
  
Flecks of grass whispered softly against his newly exposed flesh, and he snatched his arms away as if the offending greenery bore fangs. There was so much green, cascading down from where he was seated and disappearing into taller green things, with spindly long brown arms that seemed to shudder and creak.   
  
Trees. He knew of trees also. His mind, in some secretive compartment that was shrouded in shadows that coiled, knew of many things, like the name of the whistling breeze and the grassy meadow. It knew that the plump white formations above him were clouds.   
  
It knew that a hole in the ground that occupied a person was usually called a grave.   
  
His grave had been shallow, they knew he would be back.  
  
His fingers twitched against the soft dirt around him, chewed-up nails disappearing into the earth. A breeze jostled through the valley, bowing the trees and catching his hair in wispy torrents as it tanged around his mud-spattered horns.   
  
Beneath the mar there were scars, thin and pale; a million painted stories of survival that he had no memory of.  
  
He had no memory at all.  
  
Simultaneously he understood and he knew nothing. He knew that he was a person, that the thundering drumbeat beneath his chest was a heartbeat, that life pulsed in his veins. He knew that he was fallible and that he needed food and shelter. He even knew that there were other people out there, somewhere, some of them could be like him but most of them likely not. He retained enough of a memory to be functional, to _survive_ , and he wondered briefly if that was intentional.   
  
There were many things he did not know, although he knew that awakening in the bed of his own shallow grave was not natural. Dewy morning sunlight brushed his skin for what was his second First Time, and he stared pointedly at the ethereal white-gold sun until his eyes burned with tears.  
  
Part of him, sated and grumbling in the back of his mind, told him he should not have done that  
  
It was only after he blinked the sun-spots from his distorted vision that he noticed the cursive script that curled serpentine around his bicep:  
  
 _Bren Aldric Ermendrud.  
  
_ Perhaps pretentious, he had thought. Curiously he had picked at the words with a broken nail , to little avail. The markings did not flinch, stuck fast and bold.   
  
Even that brand was natural too, he realised, the name of his intended. Yet, he did not recall people or faces; he understood them vaguely as a concept, but were someone to interrogate him then and there on that grassy knoll, he would be utterly lost. Could it be possible that he had already met Bren? That they had been together before whatever event that put him in the ground occurred?   
  
Mollymauk failed to recall.   
  
It would be infinitely tragic, to have had someone so precious and to have lost their entire memory. As if the only remnant of their entire being was just a name carved upon his flesh. What would separate them from some imagined fancy?   
  
In the end he decided that it would be best to pretend that he had not yet met Bren, and that he had not awakened in a world where he was destined to be utterly and entirely alone. That fate would be the most terrible punishment that he could imagine.   
  
He hoped that whoever they put into such a solitary, unmarked grave was not the man who stepped out of it into that crisp morning air and went trudging down the rolling hills.

\---

When Caleb was nine he set a wheelbarrow ablaze with his mind, which really complicated his dream of being a farmer, like Papa.   
  
Farmers weren’t allowed to do magic - or perhaps worse, wizards could not farm! It was really quite a conundrum he found himself in.   
  
There were only a few other children in their village, but Caleb liked them well enough. During the days Mama and Papa would find work where they could, mending textiles and helping the local farmers with their harvests, and they did not like for Caleb to be home alone. He didn’t appreciate that very much, that they thought he would be naughty - Caleb tried so hard to be good. So he spent his days running amok with his friends, mostly older boys and two very dejected girls, who pretended to be very much resigned to the shenanigans that were usually their own ideas.   
  
It was this same group, lounging in outskirt fields flush with buckwheat and cropped summer grasses, that saw Caleb accidentally snap his fingers and cause a flame to leap up and consume the small wooden barrow. The dry wood creaked and groaned under the intense blaze, and Caleb had stammered useless apologies to the wood until his eyes prickled with wetness, irritated by the smoke.   
  
The other children had fled, scattered on the breeze like a flock of startled larks, leaving Caleb to babble and sniff as his skin flushed hotly with shame.  
  
His mother found him an hour later, feet still planted firmly in the earth as if he had sprouted roots, starting at the smouldering debris and ash that had once made up the farming equipment. The mangled iron flared with a red heat, slashed like a wicked grin as it burned against the gritty darkness of the grey soot.   
  
He was in so much trouble, he had thought, lip wobbling as he valiantly tried to swallow down his sobs.  
  
Except his mother had hugged him. She stumbled to a stop on that patch of flattened grass, throwing her lithe arms around his shoulders and squeezing until the very air in his lungs seemed to wheeze in protest.   
  
“Oh Bren, my clever boy,” she had whispered against his cropped hair. “Well done.”  
  
It was only much later, when he had recounted the story to his parents for what must have been the seventh time, never once watching their marvelled smiles fading, that he considered just how satisfying it had been to reduce something so hardy and _real_ to nothing with only his thoughts. 

\---

Mollymauk gave himself a name.  
  
It was the next logical step, he decided, after stumbling into a shanty town reeking of the dark earth that was clumped to his skin.  
  
He had been buried in clothes, something that he was immensely thankful for, as it appeared that wearing clothes seemed to be a trend amongst the denizens. The white linen of his shirt was stuck to the lithe cut of his body, the bones of his ribs protruding rudely against the stained fabric. The trousers cut just above the shin, and his bare feet fumbled uncomfortably over the poorly cobbled ground, catching haphazardly on stray pebbles and general debris.   
  
Everything had a name. He knew that things had a name, because as he took in the visions and the scents and the marvellous colours his mind reeled with endless snatches of almost-memory and vague recollection, a mantra of distant thoughts that he could scarcely keep up with. Every single namesake enthralled him, each object seeming so foreign and so familiar.   
  
On that morning the town pulsed with energy, and hardly anyone cast him a wayward glance as he worried his way amongst them with a jovial grin. There were canvas tents of various colours and a hubbub of flocked people, dressed in different robes and with peculiar faces that he had never seen before. He had simply stared with his face strained from the intensity of his smile grinning with equal enthusiasm at people as he did the mundane, like buckets and mop heads and little insects as they scuttled over signposts. Oh, they must have presumed him mad, gawking and laughing over the simplest of things.   
  
“You are very loud, and very foolish.” A Halfling woman had said, tittering as he laughed hysterically. Her face was weathered and dark, creased with multitudes of lines that she had informed him were wrinkles, and that it was extremely rude of him to point them out - thank you very much! - It was market day in their town, and her stall specialised in teas and herbs from around the continent.   
  
“So,” He had breathed, splaying his hands against the coarse wooden surface of the stall. “Wildemount.”  
  
“Is where we are.” She nodded, drawing her voice into a drawl.  
  
“And there are other places?” He had asked.  
  
And although it was hearty and undoubtedly at his expense, her laughter only made him grin all the wider. 

\---

Caleb stopped trying to pursue a career in farming around the same time his father had brought him home a new book.   
  
It was not too terribly different from the books he usually saw in the homes of his once-friends, with faded leather bindings that crinkled with a threat of collapsing if they were handled too roughly. The pages were yellowed and stained with blots of stray ink droplets, the printed words faded almost to incomprehension on some of the more well-loved pages.  
  
Yet it was entirely new to him too, because it was not a book for stories: it was a book of magics.  
  
So Caleb spent his time pouring over that book, passing his days memorising the words verbatim until the print of those letters were embedded into his brain.   
  
Easily enough did Caleb become utterly consumed with the teachings, picking apart the intricate schoolings until he was far more intimately familiar with the abstract teachings of spellcraft than he was with the fields he was raised to cultivate.   
  
It was not until weeks after the wheelbarrow incident, as Caleb took a moment to draw away from his reading and press a pondering finger against the name on the joint of his wrist, that he realised he had not seen any of his friends since that day. 

\---

She had kept him, for a time, the Halfling Gelara. That stout little woman who was worn with age and smelled like the herbs of her tea leaves.  
  
He made his way running her deliveries and learning what he could understand of the trade (there were a _lot_ of different types of tea, as it turned out.) Eventually, he found himself drawn into that community, finding himself adept at picking at threads of conversation and social queues in order to really get their clients hooked.   
  
Gelara had called him a people person.  
  
Mollymauk had not even felt like a person until then.  
  
He had been a thing, perhaps, a lumbering vessel for some soul that was smarting and confused, flinching away from the world as it was relearned. It was not until that day, wherein he stared solidly at his reflection in a looking glass, that he realised that he too was whole - at least enough to be perceived as a full person - and that he should probably screw his courage to the sticking place.  
  
So he allowed himself to grow, and to simply be. He spoke loudly because he enjoyed it, told tales and weaved together fables to entice laughter from his companions because he enjoyed that, too. Little by little he flooded his world with colours, starting with bangles that evolved into piercings and baubles, and it was simply natural progression that he made that body of his a canvas for the soul within.  
  
When the Fletching and Moondrop Circus arrived on the outskirts of their town, radiant with vibrant colours and exotic noise, Mollymauk discovered that he himself was an oddity even amongst those strange people.   
  
They were all strangers to him, but Gelara told him that it looked like his home had found him, and she said it with so much conviction that even Mollymauk had believed her. 

\---

Trent Ikithon took him when he turned thirteen.   
  
It had been so overwhelming, a tidal wave of excitement and giddy happenings intruding so suddenly into his mundane little world. Before they had been approached by the peculiar man Caleb’s magics had been so limited; helping his mother save money on lighting the furnace, setting up additional wards around livestock pens, setting little runic traps for the mice that Frumpkin was much too lazy to actually pursue.   
  
Caleb always let the pudgy little cat take credit for the kills, though, if only to convince his parents that he was worth keeping around.   
  
But Trent had found him, somehow, impossibly, miraculously -   
  
_-unfortunately.  
  
_ The man had stumbled into their home with two officious looking guards at his flank, prefaced only by a dreadfully blunt letter on a paper the quality of which Caleb had only ever imagined before, a pristine milky white that didn’t creak at his touch. Penned on the letter had been a brief introduction, granting his name and explaining that he had heard tremendous things about the strange son of these farmerfolk, and he was very much inclined towards paying them a visit. He had drawn his wretched narrow face into a smile, had clasped hands with his mother and his father and had built shrines upon his sordid words, until even Caleb was transfixed and so very happy to accept an invitation when it was extended to him.  
  
Curiously, after he had packed all of his earthly belongings into a single beaten travel pack, he found his thoughts wandering to Lucien, and whether he would find that person hidden away in the vastness of Rexxumtrum. 

\---

Mollymauk did not mention the name on his skin to anyone.  
  
The first few months of his travels with the carnival were chaotic and consuming and utterly brilliant. Days passed in snatches of motion and colour, of learning new trades and quickly abandoning the ones that he held no love for. He was introduced to an array of new people, of which he recalled even fewer names than he cared to confess.   
  
His modest linens were switched for gaudy silks and leathers, his horns capped regally with gold and the brutal weight of twin swords bestowed to him.   
  
For all that he had no panache for juggling and dexterous hand-work, he was truly quite the swordsman. 

He turned himself into a canvas, something exhilarating to behold. Gradually his skin was painted with swatches of tattoos, a vast array of conflicting styles and studies that cluttered his skin like a collection of constellations. He did not focus too keenly on those strange red welts - too much like eyes but much too blind - as they were hidden beneath the inks.  
  
Bren’s name was not amongst the blemishes that he decided to conceal.  
  
Instead, he turned his skin into a shrine. With all the bravado he could muster he pleaded for the gnome who tattooed him to turn that foreign name into a centrepiece of colour and gorgeous detail, to make it as awe inspiring to look upon for any stranger just as much as it was for him.   
  
When he could not answer any questions about his beloved the gnome stared at him with abstract pity, and Mollymauk grinned back simply and pretended he did not notice.

\---

Rexxumtrum was a dark city, the grey skies often laden with sodden dark clouds, the heavy plumes hanging like veils and snuffing out any signs of the stars above.   
  
It was on one of those typical dark evenings, with the chandelier above illuminating his quill, that Caleb scratched a wet line of ink through the name on his skin.   
  
Rain pattered harshly against the glazed glass of the high windows, streaking the surface with a mournful trickle. Caleb thought of the babble of the streams from his hometown, recalling the glistening white and grey pebbles that he and his friends would skip across the surface.  
  
He clenched his hands absently, remembering how smooth and gentle they had felt in his small palms. Marvelled at how that feeling contrasted so severely with the burning ache that ricocheted through his very core, radiating so painfully from the abrasively sharp gemstone that Ikithon had embedded beneath the skin of his right forearm.   
  
Once he was finally satisfied that Lucien was no longer visible, only a distorted smudge of ink that he could imagine had been smeared there by mistake as he studied, he set the tip of the quill to the sensitive flesh just below, and began to painstakingly pen another name.  
  
He bit his tongue firmly between his teeth as he worked, the blood thrumming in his ears part eagerness and another part fear.   
  
Simply, far too easily did the name _Astrid_ appear, and he set the quill aside to drip stray ink down onto his notes as his eyes remained affixed to that single name on his skin.   
  
Almost a prayer touching his tongue, Caleb raised his wrist to his lips and blew so very gently onto the ink to dry it to his flesh, imploring the Gods and feeling the feral burn of magic in his fingertips as he willed that name to stay branded to him.

\---

It took two years for someone to muster the courage to ask Mollymauk about the name on his wrist.  
  
He had taken to wearing a thin leather cuff just under the print, enough to conceal it if he were to bother adjusting the clasp properly, but as he wore it loosely it only served to underline the word with a heavy punctuation.  
  
Despite their travels and the multitudes of masses who pour through their grounds he had yet to meet anyone by the name of Bren. It would be easier to keep his hope alive, he thought, if he had any memories at all.  
  
All he truly could do was pray each night to the Moonweaver that his Bren was not already gone.  
  
Often when the silver streams of moonlight brushed his skin he would take it as a whispered affirmation, a gentle reassurance that he was not so forsaken a soul that even his heart was taken from him.  
  
“Are they nice?” Yasha asked abruptly one night, with her hands threaded deeply into the thick masses of her hair, meeting his eye in the reflection of their shared vanity.  
  
When Mollymauk quirked a brow and slanted his mouth into a frown she made a frustrated noise and threw down her hands as she gave up on trying to braid her hair.  
  
“Your heart’s partner?” She elaborated, even as Mollymauk smirked and said: “heart-ner.”  
  
Much to her credit she offered him a chuckle, unpractised and gone in the next breath. No remnants of humour remained on her face.  
  
“I wouldn’t particularly know. I haven’t met them yet, but I imagine so. You know my taste as well as anyone by now and I’ve never really been particularly fond of the whole bad boy thing.” Mollymauk shrugged, clambering up from where he had been sprawled in his bed and moving closer so that he could stand behind Yasha’s broad shoulders. Even with her seated so lowly his chin scarcely lined up with the crown of her head. “God’s, I hope they’re not a war criminal.”  
  
“It is hard to find someone who is not, these days,” Yasha replied.   
  
Mollymauk laughed, despite her blunt and entirely sincere tone. He raised his hands gently to begin parting her hair with the point of his manicured claws, and he entertained himself with beginning to tightly braid her hair into the fashion she preferred. He had made it halfway through a thick swatch of hair before she spoke again.  
  
“Will you go with them, if you find them?”   
  
“I-” Mollymauk paused, and then felt his brow crease heavily with a frown. “I like it here with you. I would ask them to stay, if I could. Or ask you to come with me.”   
  
That made her pause; Mollymauk pretended not to notice the way her eyes flared wide in the reflection of the mirror, he ignored the vulnerable softness that touched her expression.   
  
“I should get your name on my other wrist, just so we’re all clear when we do meet,” Mollymauk pressed. He tightened the braid at the end, leaving a few inches of hair to curl at the very tip, before he clasped it with one of those silver beads with the runic engravings she so adored.  
  
“I would not want you to leave, either,” Yasha whispered, as if making a confession. It was extraordinarily humble, considering they had been living in one another’s metaphorical pockets for the better part of a year. “And you would not have to, even if you did meet.”  
  
She raised one of her large hands from where it had been folded in her lap. In the sputtering light thrown from their oil lamp her skin was pallid and gaunt, stark blue veins prominent against the flesh of her bare wrist.   
  
“I loved my wife so much I thought it would kill me sometimes.” Her voice was stunted, touched with a terrible sadness that caused Mollymauk’s chest to ache. “And that love we shared was true, with or without any name. Sometimes the Gods make mistakes with them. They put names where none should be, and sometimes they do not give names to those that should have them.”  
  
“Did you know,” she continued, before Mollymauk could unclench his trembling hands. “We could have been married if we had those marks? That is the only thing in the world that would have saved us, and how very stupid is that? I do not mean to hurt you, so I say this only to try to help: don’t put so much faith in someone you do not know when I know first hand how easily the Gods get this wrong.”  
  
“I have to love them,” Mollymauk murmured, raising his voice and hurriedly continuing as Yasha opened her mouth with a look of disdain. “But I love you more, you know more of me than anyone else, and for that you will always have my heart.”  
  
Yasha smiled solemnly, scarcely an impression of a curve to her mouth. Then, without further comment, she dipped her chin and Mollymauk finished braiding her hair in silence.  
  
In the end, he did not get her name tattooed on him, but he did ask for a string of flowers to be woven along his forearm. The gnome had shaken his head glumly but complied, dusting his skin with white carnations and pink geraniums until his skin became a life bed of flora, thick green stems blooming into soft petals with gentle yellow centres.   
  
Yasha did not thank him with words, but a single sprig of thuja on his pillow convinced him that his intention was well understood. 

\---

Trent took Astrid’s name from him.  
  
During one of their inspections of his gemwork, in which he prodded and probed them as if they were unfeeling creatures of mason and marble, Trent compared Caleb’s unblemished arm to the one housing the gem.  
  
Initially he had smiled, a cruel thing that twisted his lips sourly and brought no mirth to the gleam of his eye.  
  
Then, wrapping his thin fingers around Caleb’s wrist in a way that made the bone bite into the joint with a crunch, he dragged Caleb to a water basin and scrubbed the flesh until it burned and came away red and clean.  
  
“You’re ungrateful,” Trent had told him, voice severe and drenched with disdain.   
  
“I don’t want it,” Caleb had bitten back, in a brief moment of foolishness and what he had at the time considered bravery. As if that childish rebellion could have ever earned Astrid’s favour.   
  
He had been so certain of that fact too; had scorned the Gods that had been mistaken enough to mark his flesh and blood with any name that was not hers.   
  
So it was so odd, when he was dragged deep into the murky chambers of the research tower, that he had sobbed when Trent took Lucien’s name from him. That unchecked tears had cut fierce tracks down his cheeks when the word was replaced instead with a purple gemstone that caused his blood to scream in his veins, broiling like a kettle over a flame.  
  
He had returned to his room only to clamber into his bed and weep until his throat was hoarse and his head throbbed in tandem with the pain in his arm. His fingers pressed intently at the edges of that terrible wound and he prayed until his head was spinning for that name to be given back to him in full.  
  
It had been a cruel lesson, tempered into him with iron severity, but Caleb learned to never again take anything for granted while he was housed under the roof of Trent Ikithon.

\---

For all the misery that haunted the halls of that estate, lurking like spectres in the shadows of those ancient studies and leaving them coming awake screaming and shaking into the darkness of the night, there was still the occasional joy to be found.  
  
On the evenings in which Trent was being hosted at the estate of another member of the Assembly, the trio were able to sneak out into the city and drink themselves into a gleeful enough stupor that they could pretend to be normal, even just for a night, even when one of Astrid’s gemstones flared and sputtered out sparks of pain as the alcohol seeped into her bloodstream.  
  
Their preferred beer hall was crude and inconspicuous. The floors consisted of wooden boards that bore the scratches of heels and a few unrecognisable stains splattering the surface; it could have been ale, Caleb shrugged, even if Eadwulf insisted that it was blood. A long bar occupied the furthest wall, with a ruddy faced and thickly bearded man washing down the silver pitchers with a disinterested curve of his brow.  
  
 _‘I won’t ask why you’re here if you won’t ask why I’m okay with serving a bunch of kids’  
  
_ Truly, Caleb quite appreciated the man.   
  
It was on one of those evenings in which opportunity had presented a window of escape that the three found themselves huddled in that hall and nursing a collection of glasses between them.   
  
Eadwulf was propped at the bar, making idle conversation with a young girl who hid her smile behind the curve of her hand in the manner of a proper lady.   
  
“Can I ask you a question?” Astrid asked him in a conspiratorial tone.   
  
“Anything,” Caleb replied.  
  
“I know that Master Ikithon disapproves a great deal on entertaining such things but I truly do have to wonder. I never had anyone to ask at home, and now that we’re here sometimes I’m frightened to even think about it just in case he would know.”   
  
Her words remained steadfast and thoughtful, even as Caleb sneered at her use of Trent’s proper title where he need not be respected. Her intelligent eyes rolled with an exasperated sort of fondness, even as she pressed on with more insistence.   
  
“I, well, forgive me if this is childish fancy but do you believe much in soulmarks?”   
  
The words struck him like a fist, stuttering his breath in his throat even as his knuckles whitened in the sudden intensity of his grip. His eyes flickered immediately away from her frowning mouth and down at the stained surface of the table they shared.  
  
“I have read a few things on them,” he confessed hesitantly, wetting his suddenly dry lips. “I confess that not much of it was academic, but I’m familiar with the premise of the names. What was the likelihood of it now-?”  
  
“One in five,” Astrid interrupted, much too quickly.  
  
“One in five,” Caleb repeated, drawing the statistic out as he considered it. “That is a lot of people to take bodily autonomy from.”  
  
“I have a name,” Astrid continued, voice an unfamiliar murmur that was so jarring to hear fall from her typically confident mouth that Caleb found himself almost unable to process the words.  
  
And then, once they were processed, he felt his breaking heart stop beating for a terrible moment where it hung suspended in the cavity of his chest. His eyes prickled with a burning wetness that he hated himself for.   
  
“Oh,” he said, stupidly.   
  
“It’s- they’re-” She took a moment to compose herself, rasping a hand over the frowning curve of her mouth. “It is not an Empire name, Bren.”  
  
“ _Oh,_ ” he breathed, this time feeling those fragments of his heart truly shatter. Any scraps of selfish jealousy were chased away by pure magnanimous grief, and he stretched out a desperate hand to touch her own trembling fingers where they lay on the table between them. For a moment they remained terribly still, before she twisted her fingers to intertwine with his own in a fond squeeze.  
  
“He wants me to use it, when we’re older, if I ever meet them,” she continued, voice wavering in such a tiny way, for a moment the façade giving way to a reflection of the child she truly was. “To get any information that may be used for the betterment and interest of the Empire.”  
  
“You, Astrid, are the bravest girl that I have ever had the pleasure to know,” Caleb began, squeezing their trembling hands together until the blood in his fingertips felt fit to burst. “And I trust that if you ever meet that lucky, lucky person, you will be strong enough to do what is right.”  
  
Astrid laughed then, a bitter thing that caused Caleb’s skin to feel stretched and worn like hide on a rack, suddenly aged and bitter. She laughed and laughed in that silent way of hers until the humour gave way to a deluge of tears that Caleb politely pretended not to see falling.  
  
In return Astrid made no comment on the few salty tears that slipped from the corners of his own eyes and fell unbidden on the surface of the table. 

\---

Day and night became interwoven neatly into an endless lattice of stretching time that served only to set his nerves on edge.   
  
The cell that held him was unremarkable and drear, white stone walls that climbed up smoothly to meet the expanse of a white stone ceiling. A single cot was pushed into the corner of the room, with a thin blanket that harboured wayward threads in their corners and a single white pillow that offered no support during those long nights.  
  
Caleb passed his days very simply; he awoke with a hollow ache in his head, a thudding that may have been the pathetic hammering of his heartbeat. He grew to despise that sound, loathed his body for forcing him to endure when he craved nothing more than to fall into a sleep that claimed him.  
  
It was what he deserved.

So Caleb would stare at those plain walls and think, think of his family and his friends of childhood, of how those kind eyed children who taught him to tie his laces and who learned to read their letters alongside him would look at him with such abstract disgust if they discovered who had left the Ermendrud house a smouldering wreck.  
  
He wondered briefly if they would remember the wheelbarrow, if one of them would be bright enough to connect the dots. Kent, perhaps? He had always been so keen of mind.   
  
Their wrath was deserved, also.  
  
Sometimes, if he was desperate enough for the torture, he would roll up his sleeves to reveal the scarred expanse of his forearms. The threads of white incisions were crude and garish, raising his skin with grooves like the grainy interior of a wooden statue. Caleb would press his fingers to the savagely pale welt that tore along his wrist, far deeper than the others and marred with a jumbled impression of inky black text. If he squinted enough he could make out the beginning of an _L_ just where the head of the wound began.   
  
_Lucien_ he would think with a feral desperation, _Lucien would have to love him._ The Gods had foretold it when they tattooed that name on his skin.  
  
Even so, he lay at night envisioning their meeting, and in each telling that faceless figure flinched away from him with disgust. The word _kinslayer_ spilling from lips he could not put a face to in a voice that was shapeless except for the vitriol venom.   
  
But Caleb endured it, because that hatred was deserved too. 

\--- 

Three days outside of Trostenwald he found that old tattoo artist in his battered little tent. 

And when Mollymauk had asked for a single sprig of aloe flower to curve underneath _Bren’s_ name, the man had taken to his needle with a look of resignation that Mollymauk had long become accustomed to. 


	2. Chapter 2

Their troop - and that’s what they ultimately were, nothing formal enough to be a group, not nearly talented or proficient enough to be considered a team of professionals - was certainly a curious one. It was an amalgamation of barbed people forced into proximity, all hunched shoulders and snarling teeth. They glanced off of one another far more than they complimented, tripping into each other in combat and glaring with distrust over smoky campfires. 

Truly, Mollymauk wondered why they bothered sticking together. If someone were to break that terse silence, the ‘I won’t ask if you won’t’ sort of truce that they had established in their early days, he imagined that things would run much smoother. But that would require a modicum of truth, and while there were surely some tarnished gems amongst the lot of them, they were all cracked facets of deceit at the end of the day. 

He couldn’t even write a list of the honest things he knew about half of them, because that would require more than two points to constitute as a list. He would also have to learn how to write, but honestly that would probably be less effort than having an honest conversation with the Nein. 

Jester was the exception to that, most likely. She spoke of her family and her home with such conviction, a fond curl to her smile even as her eyes went hazy with that soft sort of vagueness that belied her sorrow. He wanted to pull her aside on some days, to touch his hand to her shoulder and ask what made her run away, but he doubted that she would tell him the full story. She would not lie outright to him, because it was Jester and she was undoubtedly the best of them, but she would stumble through some half-aborted little tale that never quite reached a point.

Without the lies and the implied treachery, Mollymauk did not know what their group really  _ was _ . 

(What it was, truly, was Jester’s laugher, howling and strained, as if she would simply die if she did not wheeze until her lungs ached. A laugh that seemed to flutter like birdsong, a laugh that sounded like early mornings in a meadow of wheatgrass. 

It was Beauregard’s tired smiles and smudged eyeliner, dark kohl staining her fingertips. It was a young woman having some protective shell chipped away at without quite realising. It was a woman who, if Molly had any say in it, would be able to smile without a distinct sort of pain touching her eyes one of these days. 

It was a goblin with manners, who lived in discordant shadows and butchered creatures for sport only to come home to her human, to curl at his side and preen over him like some tender matron of murder. 

It was that human, eyes harried and lips so abused by teeth that the welts split and capped with red blood when he frowned, which was well, most of the time. It was his copper hair reeking distinctly of sulphur and dirt, and it was how Mollymauk could hear the clamour of his blood as it seethed in his veins when a log would buckle in one of their campfires. 

The flames would roar and Mollymauk would smell  _ fear _ .)

Their group was formless, held together by spite and mis-placed determination. But there was a potential broaching between them when each morning the sun dawned and they all still lived. 

With trepidation guiding their movements their bedrolls moved gradually closer over the months, the frosts of winter encouraging impromptu dog-piles. Where once Fjord would have balked at the prospect of Molly’s infernal hands on him, it was not too terribly unusual for them to wake up with Fjord’s forehead pressed to the span of Mollymauk’s back as they slept. 

Tieflings were natural hearths, warmed by their brimstone and damnation. The group sought that touch from him on dark nights when the prospects of monsters and memories lurked in the shadows. 

Mollymauk did not mind the comfort - like the old woman had said, he was a people person. 

Perhaps that was it then, he realised one morning. Sure, he did not have a Circus to return to, so he may as well press on with these almost-strangers. But there was more to it, a determined flare of warmth that brewed deep in his bones as if the marrow itself was aching. He wanted to meld these people into something. 

He wanted to make the difference. He needed to give this new life of his purpose. 

\---

They decidedly did not talk about soulmates. 

Not that they tended to talk about anything of much import. Generally conversation was a stunted discussion of their meals and occasionally a quip they had heard once in their non-descript past. 

But soulmates were not even referenced in the vaguest sense. It was difficult to suss who amongst them was afflicted with that blessed curse, because all of their wrists were conveniently covered with leather bracers and silver bangles, or, oddly, ropes of bandages that were gritty with dirt. 

Mollymauk considered telling them all that Yasha was his heart, just to broach the subject. Yet that thought always caused a bitter pang of something unpleasant to unfurl in his chest, cold and pressing against his ribs like a bruise. He loved her, truly, but the thought always felt like a betrayal. A sour thing that turned giddy on the tail. Because if Yasha caused his heart to flare he could scarcely imagine how his world would look once Bren stepped into it. 

Gods, on some nights he ached so fiercely for that shapeless person that he wanted to cry. 

Sometimes he did, when they slept over in a tavern that allowed them individual rooms. Sometimes the whores he found did not mind if he wept quietly, as they were pulling their clothes back on and bidding him farewell.

So Mollymauk did not keep his name covered, although the cuff of his coat often fell beyond where it was carved on his forearm. The rest of his body was a canvass of ink, and people were always more transfixed by those paintings than by occupying themselves looking for a name. 

He kept the bracelet close and easy to tug over the name regardless, just as a precaution, even if that particular accessory felt like defeat. 

\---

Caleb was the worst of them, he decided. 

He was still trying to suss out whether it was because the man was a terrible liar, or if he had been isolated from society for so long that he no longer knew the conventions. He stumbled into conversations like they were a game he did not know the rules for. His head ducked down, chin almost vanishing into the collar of his tightly fastened coat. Sometimes he would laugh, awkward and causing a scrawl of red flush to brighten his skin.

Mollymauk liked that sound, wanted to devote his life to drawing it out of Caleb until the man was no longer surprised by it. 

There were a few sounds he wanted to draw out of Caleb, quite honestly. 

But those thoughts were treacherous, because Caleb was not  _ really _ a stranger. He knew how the man liked his alcohol (bitter and tart, anything with a white foam) and how he could only sleep with his legs tucked up to his chest. He would pick apart his breakfast at the opposite end of the table from Molly, with his chin held aloft in one hand even as he used his fork to underscore some point he was making to Beauregard. 

Looking at Caleb was like looking at an inferno, blinding and dangerous and distinctly beautiful in a ‘one of the Gods’ natural disasters’ sort of ways. It was like a painting of some great flood about to strike a small town off a map; terrible to consider but the way those acrylics blended was admittedly gorgeous. 

Mollymauk could not expect to take him to bed without becoming ensnared - there was a dangerous glint to his eye and a horrible potential in his soot-stained hands and some damnation in the way his lips twitched so softly when Jester would sing. 

It was unfair. Both to himself and to Bren.

Sometimes he wished he believed Yasha’s words, a year ago and spoken with such conviction. Because she had been right, the Gods  _ were _ cruel. They were terrible enough to embed Bren’s name to his skin and then to place Caleb before him. 

Not that it was an issue, because Caleb would not take him, anyway.

Sometimes people are just sad, Yasha had told him many years ago, when he was young and probed too much about her past. There is a profound sort of sadness that swells in your chest like hot air, suffocating your lungs and creaking against your bones. 

Caleb looked like that brand of sad, most days, during their early travels. His eyes were always punched dark with sleep-deprived bruises, his bitten nails dragging tracks against his face when his nerves drummed him into some anxious mantra. When they find themselves on the better-side of drunk and laughing in taverns, Caleb’s smirk was always tinged with some melancholy slant. His eyes never tracked people the way Mollymauk and Beauregard tended to; their resident Wizard never leered at the next attractive person that they pointed out on their ventures. 

Sometimes Mollymauk doubted that Caleb wanted at all.

But he _did_ , Mollymauk figured out after a while. There was a distinct way his blood would quicken against that delicate juncture of his throat whenever someone would accomplish something magical and brilliant.

But hey, whatever floated his boat. Mollymauk had been turned on by weirder, and he wouldn't begrudge the Wizard his kink for the arcane. 

Still, it proved to raise a question.  Mollymauk wondered if pressing Caleb into soft sheets and fucking him gently would accomplish anything at all. Sometimes it seemed like he would only need a tender hand lost in his hair to come undone. Sometimes Beauregard would press a flat palm to his shoulder in passing and the man looked as if he was prime to fall apart at the seams. 

Mollymauk wanted to take him apart slowly, to dismantle the tension from his shoulders and the misery from his eyes until he was left with the man he so rarely caught a flash of on those better days, when he was easy with his words and with his crude attempts at humour. 

For all that Yasha lectured him for his reckless behaviour in battle, pressing his lips to the soft expanse of Caleb’s forehead was the most dangerous thing he ever did to himself. 

\---

They travelled to the beck and call of coin; like any good band of roving mercenaries. Just because some of them looked pretty did not make them any different from any other bunch of cut throats, after all. 

For the most part they subsided on commission, picking up contracts to slay some fabled creature or a request to escort a nobleman across some allegedly dangerous countryside. It was unusual for them to receive a request, or even a recommendation. Which is what made their current job proposition so dreadfully curious. 

A few weeks back they had assisted some field journalist in hunting down a rare specimen, had gutted it at his whim so that he could draw it in some little leather notebook and leave them with the corpse and the heavy shroud of death. They had heard nothing from him since, until only last week when they received a little scrap of parchment asking that they travel South, almost hugging the coastline, so that they could embark on another scientific venture for one of his colleagues.

They offered three-hundred gold for the contract, and Caleb had dropped his tankard as Jester read the letter aloud. 

So they found themselves three days into the wilderness and heading southward bound. The weather was pleasant in that damp ‘nice to watch from a window’ way, the sky darkened with plump grey clouds and a breeze that whipped the trees into a frenzy. 

“I’m going to shave myself bald,” Nott snarled, as the long torrents of her dark hair smacked against her face for the fourth time that morning. 

“Do you want a pin?” Beauregard asked, voice wrung with poorly concealed amusement. Mollymauk could not see her face but he could envision the way her mouth dimpled at the corners. 

“No,” she replied, voice brash. “I want to get out of these hills.”

“Bad news regarding that,” Fjord interjected, wryly. “Because according to the map we have at least three more days of hills before we even dream of finding some flatlands.”

From any other member of their group the words may have been softened with some embedded apology, but from Fjord they were distinctly smug. It was a wonder they all got anything done, considering they spent half the time winding each other up and fantasising about tearing each other apart. 

“Hills are safer,” Caleb said, amicably. He was bundled up in that beaten overcoat, the collar that had once been plush with fur was scabby with scarcely-there patches of white hide. His hands were tucked next to his chest, thumbs looped around the leather straps of his travel pack. A sliver of a pale wrist peaked out, and Mollymauk stared at the blemished skin for a few stunted moments. He felt like some dainty maiden, feeling flustered over a patch of skin. But mostly it made him sad, with how thin and brittle the man truly was beneath his baggy clothes. 

“Did you travel through hills a lot, then?” Mollymauk asked. 

It was a stupid question; unimportant and dreadfully mundane. But Mollymauk had done and said more foolish things in a bid to win Caleb’s attention before, and he doubted that asking about his prior hiking experience would even scrape an honourable mention if he ever itemised the encounters. Pinning him to a wall would probably be up there, although to his credit he did not truly know the depths of Caleb’s complex at the time, and pressing someone up against a wall had solved a tremendous amount of his problems in the past. 

It also was the kindest punishment he had thought of at the time. 

“Not really,” is Caleb’s mumbled response. “But, you know-” there is a monotony to his voice, a pinched tightness to his jaw. Mollymauk, for a moment, is struck by the thought of what Caleb must have been like as a youth, blushing at the ground and stammering over every sentence. “- there is less visibility.”

“I wouldn’t know, actually,” Mollymauk replied, just for the sake of being contradictory. “The circus tended to  _ want _ a crowd. It would be pointless if we didn’t make a show about coming into town.”

“I think there’s a metaphor about that,” Nott interjected, using her talons to pick wispy hairs from out of her mouth. 

“How would  _ you _ know that?” Fjord asked. 

“Why is it any of your business what I know?” Nott snarled back.

Mollymauk pinched his eyes shut with a sigh, a weary sort of exhaustion prickling along his skin like a shroud of cold water. He closed the distance between himself and Caleb, leering down so that he could faux-whisper in the tone he often adopted for his more jovial readings: “what time is it?”

“Ten-to-eleven,” Caleb replied, dead-pan and without a hint of hesitation.

Mollymauk grinned, despite that Caleb did not turn to meet his gaze. 

“We almost made it a whole morning without getting at each other’s throats,” he mused, letting his voice meld into something easy and sociable. “I think we might be getting the hang of this. Give it a few more weeks and we’ll be holding hands and tucking each other in at night.”

Caleb’s shoulders twitched at that. Mollymauk could tell because the fur-trim of his coat did some weird little jolt. Then, without any sort of acknowledgement, not even one of his strained insincere laughs, he raised up his hands to snatch up the hood of his cloak, concealing his face from view.

Mollymauk stared dumbly at the treated leather, squinting as he picked over what he said. He didn’t believe that he did anything wrong, but then again, he had about two-years of social interaction under his belt and he was not entirely convinced that any of it was properly taught. 

At least he had not lashed out at him, or made an effort to put any distance between them.

It was progress. 

\---

Yasha had once told him that the soul of a person was reflected in their eyes. 

That knowledge had changed how Mollymauk took to conversation; the words were only ever a garnish. People could say what they wanted, it was their gaze that would unfurl the true tale. It took a few months to really hone that skill, to figure out how to incline his head into some enticing invitation for conversation rather than a harrowing glare that would frighten children. 

If he was going to be a people person he should at least make an effort to become adept at it, after all.

But that knowledge had changed how he would look at himself in the mirror, too. He would stare at the vacuous crimson pools of his own gaze, willing some sort of emotion to stir there. A feral desperation would sometimes make his mouth twitch into a snarl. 

His eyes were always so  _ empty _ .

\---

They did not talk about soulmates - not up until their seventh night on the road down South.

Camp was made under a canopy of wispy trees, trunks still lithe with youth and their spindly limbs clambering up towards the dark sky above. A white moon peered through the interlocking fingers above, and Mollymauk preened whenever that soft light touched his skin. It was a comforting embrace, one that warmed his skin better than any flame. The moon had always known the man that was buried, and still it shined on the man that was risen.

That had to stand for something. 

A small fire sputtered between their semi-circle of bedrolls, packed over old pine needles in some little clearing. They had built up a few heavy stones around the flame, so that the light was diminished and hard to spy from a distance. The trek had left them exhausted and no one was particularly eager for a midnight scrap because they had stupidly signalled their location to every brigand in the area. 

Still, Mollymauk offered to take up first watch, just in case. 

It wasn’t something he particularly disliked. There was a quaint fondness to watching the encampment settle down for the night. Some foreign feeling would brew in his gut, heady and warm like a shot of sweet brandy. It was domestic, the way the area was softened with the breathing of his companions, slowed by peaceful sleep.

Mollymauk tucked a hand into one of his pockets, fingers picking through an array of titbits he should probably organise; a few stray coins, a spool of thread, a few folded posters from Fletching and Moondrop that would likely be considered antiques now, and finally he felt the firm outline of his tarot deck. 

He snatched it out easily, the weight a reassuring thing as the deck settled into his palm. The first rasp of his thumb over the ridged sides was pleasant, like they were purring awake beneath his touch. There was no magic to his touch in the moment, but he could swear that some arcane haze swelled as he shuffled them idly. 

The cards fanned out with a flourish as he raised his gaze to scan across the camp; a collection of steadily breathing mounds of blankets, all tucked up and- and an empty roll, with a knitted blanket thrown to the side. 

Jester had left them only half an hour ago, and although it was irrational to raise any alarm it still set his nerves to a knife’s edge. She was likely off doing something decidedly normal, but Mollymauk reasoned that it was better to walk into something awkward and ensure her safety than to leave her out and alone if she actually needed help.

That reasoning had led him walking in on Fjord, cock in hand, fist in mouth, at least five times already - it wasn’t  _ good _ reasoning, and he really needed to come up with a better alternative before he seared something terrible into his brain. They needed to address it as a group at some point - a sock on the door handle was a timeless classic. 

The day that he walked in on Beauregard in the act would be the day that Mollymauk would take a long walk off of a short pier.

So, with a dejected sigh and bracing himself for something decidedly embarrassing and slightly funny, he plucked himself up and headed off in the direction he had seen Jester wander off to earlier that evening. 

The flame from their fire did not give off much light, and heavy shadows quickly fell across him as he pressed on. The nip of the night air drew in steadily, pressing against him in a way that layered against his heated skin. It was refreshing, like wetting a blade after hammering it over coals. 

It was not difficult to find Jester, she was decidedly not very quiet in anything that she did. Her laughter was the rolling crash of a wave; her voice was loud and distinct. 

So too was her crying, it seemed. 

Mollymauk steeled himself for something much worse than finding his friend in the act, and instead followed the sound of wet sniffles until he was staring up at some proud looking pine tree.

At its base Jester was bundled up, knees drawn up to her chin as she hugged them tightly to her chest. The hood of her little cloak was pulled up, concealing her head, and only a plume of dark cobalt hair peaked out from beneath the shroud. The hooded mantle shifted as he approached, his boots creaking against the unquiet woodland floor. 

“You alright?” Mollymauk broached - a stupid question, because the answer was fairly obvious - and pressed closer. 

Jester snatched up a hand to wipe across her nose with a damp breath, her voice wrung out and wounded sounding. She flattened her fingers against the hood, pushing it back to reveal her face. Her eyes were damp with tears, spilling over and clinging to her lashes in droplets like pearls. Her chin wobbled even as her mouth rounded into some abstract little smile as her gaze met his own.

“Oh yeah,” Jester laughed, a feeble sound that punctured Mollymauk’s heart. “I’m so great. Just fantastic. Really good.”

Mollymauk did not stop until he reached her, his form casting a dark shadow over her in the moonlight. He dropped down into a crouch, bracing his arms against his thighs even as he levelled his eyes with her own. 

“Are you hurt?” he asked. 

“No,” Jester immediately shook her head, and the chains that adorned her horns rattled with the motion. “Not really, just like, hurt feelings-” she sniffed wetly, scoffing out a self depreciating laugh which did not suit her gentle voice -”which I guess doesn’t count anymore, when we get actually hurt all the time. You got stabbed last week and here I am crying about nothing.”

“Just because I did not cry does not mean my coping is any better,” Mollymauk replied, softly. 

It was second nature for him to reach out to lay his palm flat against her arm, entirely thoughtless, like cradling some baby bird in his palms as it called for its mother. 

“Am I annoying?” Jester asked, abruptly. She raised her hands to brush a veil of tears from her eyes, instead smearing them across her cheeks with some glossy sheen. She sniffed wetly, affixing her firm gaze onto Mollymauk. It was like being pierced, pinned in place and unable to do anything but stare resolutely back. 

“Not at all-” he frowned,  _ not to me _ \- “if it weren’t for you I don’t think half of those people back in that camp would still be here.”

“Do you think Beau likes me?” Jester continued. Her chin wobbled around the question, her voice catching thickly in her throat. 

“I couldn’t imagine a world where she did not,” Mollymauk replied, rather than spouting the truth. ‘ _ I don’t even think that she likes herself. _ ’

"Why, has she said something?"

“She hasn’t said anything,” Jester sobbed, “that’s the problem!”

“I-” Mollymauk squinted, feeling some strange tendrils scrape along the inside of his skull as he struggled to unpack that statement. “I don’t follow.”

“She never talks to me,” Jester pressed, trembling as her chest heaved. 

“She talks to you more than anyone else here. You knew her before any of us, and if it came to a toss-up between you and Fjord I believe that she’d always be on your side,” Mollymauk replied, squinting. 

Jester had been alone, Mollymauk realised. Beauregard and Fjord were likely the first friends she had ever made that were her own age, and Mollymauk knew better than most that those awkward habits like possessiveness and abandonment anxiety were supposed to be stomped out in the gangly years of youth. But if Jester had no childhood friendships of her own, if she had no experience, she likely had all of those terrible emotions yet to come.

“Oh,” Mollymauk breathed, rubbing his palm in soothing little circles over her forearms. “You’re jealous!”

“I am  _ not _ ,” Jester hissed, snatching her arm back and folding them pertly across her chest. There was a childish pout to her lip, eyes glossy with the remnants of tears, but nothing new was being shed. 

“I just-” Jester sighed, leaning back to _thunk_ her head against the tree behind her. In the pale moonlight her skin was pallid. “It’s hard to explain, I haven’t ever met anyone else who- I-”

She fell resolutely into silence, dark lashes shuttering over her eyes even as her pulse beat some deafening mantra in her throat. Mollymauk allowed her the silence, weighted and contemplative, and he adjusted himself to sit down so that he was sprawled in the dirt alongside her, pine needles and fresh churned earth smearing into his clothes.

A beat of silence passed easily, sprawling on endlessly into something that could have been an hour. Jester’s breathing tempered, the tear tracks dried into grim stains against her cheeks. 

“Do you know anyone who has a soulmate?” Jester asked, finally. 

Any air was punched out of his lungs, a hollow ache swooping through his gut. Mollymauk glanced sidelong at Jester; her face blank, eyes still fixed assuredly on the canopy above. 

“I-” Mollymauk didn’t sweat - it was one of the small mercies that came from his Tiefling disposition - but his palms suddenly felt clammy. “I, well-”

_ Fuck it _ , he thought. If he wanted honesty from these people perhaps he should offer some of his own in exchange. 

His fingers, trembling, damp, found his sleeve and tugged it up to the crook of his elbow. In the dim moonlight his skin was a clutter of scars and tattoos, floral designs meeting the rigid raised flesh. Nestled in a swirl of colour, and partly indistinguishable, was  _ Bren _ . Mollymauk tapped a talon to the name, ignoring the delighted thrill that ran through him at the action. 

“Oh-” Jester breathed, any hint of devastation lost from her voice. The tone came out almost delighted, the trill of music chasing her laughter. She reached out, placing her hands softly around Mollymauk’s arm as she pulled it into her lap, tracing the pads of her fingers delicately across the lettering. 

“Bren,” she whispered, sounding it out. Mollymauk stared at her, feeling his jaw slacken into some stupid looking gape. He’d never heard anyone else say it like that before, Not with the reverence that Jester put to the name. Yasha had always been so scornful, Mollymauk had been bitter. 

“Have you met them before?” Jester asked.

“Not yet,” Mollymauk replied, a whisper. 

“I bet they’re fancy, with a name like that,” Jester smiled.

“Not nearly as fancy as you, I reckon,” Mollymauk jibed.

Jester let him go softly, leaving his arm tucked up in her lap so that they were trapped in some awkward half-embrace. She raised both of her hands to her chest, beginning to tug at the lace of the bracer on her left arm. Mollymauk knew what was coming of it, there wasn’t much else you could exactly hide under a bracer after all, but his breath still caught curiously in his throat as she shucked off the armour.

Her skin was pale and dry beneath the armour, he noticed.  _ How long have you been wearing that thing? _ He wanted to chastise, but his gaze instead locked intently on the neat, blunt script that ran along her forearm. 

It was expected, entirely anticipated, but still strange. To see the name  _ Beauregard Lionett  _ a dark impression against Jester’s skin, coloured black like the bruise of a broken bone.

“I thought I was going to marry a nobleman or a prince,” Jester said, after a moment in which they both stared at the name in deep silence.

“Fuck me is that why you’re crying?” Mollymauk asked, terse. “Because I’d be upset too.”

“No,” Jester hissed, pressing her thumb against the name hard enough to hurt. Mollymauk winced. “I just, I’m happy. I think-”

“You think?”

“It’s a lot to process.” Jester’s hand found Mollymauk’s own again, fingers squeezing with a strength that was belied by the delicate plushness of her palm. “I went my whole life expecting to meet some man and to have a torrid affair like in all the stories. I had planned everything Molly, I even drew what I wanted him to look like.”

“You set yourself up for disappointment,” Mollymauk said, incapable of being anything but unkind. 

“I’m not disappointed,” Jester protested.

“You  _ are _ ,” Mollymauk replied. “You’re disappointed, and that’s alright.”

Jester did not reply, her head bowed so that her chin was tucked into the folds of her cloak and her hand tightened against Mollymauk’s grip. 

“That’s the thing about people,” Mollymauk murmured, “they’re spontaneous and individual. You can plan out your whole entire life as perfect as you want, but you’ll never be able to account for everyone else. Are you disappointed because it’s Beauregard?”

“I-” Jester sighed, defeated and hollow. “I don’t know.”

“Or are you disappointed because she hasn’t said anything to you about it?” 

“I don’t  _ know _ !” Jester snapped, turning to face Mollymauk head on. Her eyes were wide, lilac iris wet with emotion. 

“I like Fjord,” Jester said, after a moment of profound silence. It was said with conviction, but Mollymauk wasn’t sure whether she was trying to convince him or convince herself. 

“Gods,” Mollymauk winced, forcing an edge of faux-mockery into his tone. “Fjord, are you sure? He’s just so-”

“Nice.” 

“That’s one way of putting it, sure.”

“He’s kind, Molly,” Jester pressed, “he’s looked after me for all of this time, he’s taught me about surviving outside of the city and he’s got a really good heart.”

_ And he fits right into that little narrative of yours, _ Mollymauk thought, hollowly. 

"I thought you'd be all over this soulmate schtick," Mollymauk replied. 

"I _am-_ " Jester protested, hollowly. "I was. I don't know. It's different, reading about it compared to actually seeing it. It would make sense if it were Fjord."

"Who said it was supposed to make sense?" Mollymauk asked.

"Lots of people don't end up with their soulmate," Jester reasoned, voice hollow.

Beauregard typically wasn’t the type of person to garner pity; anyone who had the audacity to level her with a look of sympathy quickly found the emotion knocked off of their face. But in that moment Mollymauk felt something sharp twist in his heart, if only for a moment. 

“I need to get you back to bed,” Mollymauk pressed, standing up and taking a moment to brush the debris from his coattail. “I’ll never get trusted with the first watch again if we come back to camp and everyone has been eaten by wolves or some shit.”

He offered his hand out and, after a moment of hesitation, Jester took it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for your lovely comments and for your kudos! I really appreciate it <3
> 
> just for a world-building perspective, I imagine that your soulmate name is a name that you recognise as yours. so if you go under an alias your soulname won't change, because Caleb still considers himself (or part of himself) to be Bren. However, if a person transitions and changes their name as part of that, I imagine that their soulmate's tattoo would always have been the name they end up picking, as that's their real name. hope that makes sense!


End file.
